Text Search Engine that works with Python

[Doug Farrell]

To everyone,

Thank you for all the feedback, I really appreciate it. Here is some
more detail about what I'm looking for and how it should work, this
may or may not be helpful <g>. One of the things my company works on
is a large reference title that is sold on CD-ROM. The current
un-compressed text is 70 megs. The reason we compress that currently
is because of all the other media that goes on the CD. Our current
search engine is a piece of junk, but works in the C++ environment of
our current application, which is only for Windows. I am considering
an alternative with Python for a couple of reasons. Easier to write
than C++. The app is not speed critical and I think Python would be
more than fast enough anyway, I'm considing wxPython as the GUI, so
most of the window calls are implemented in C anyway. Writing the app
in Python would possibly allow us to market the CD for Windows, Mac,
Linux and Unix systems.

So the requirements of the search engine are that it compress the text
(or have index files so small that compression is un-necessary) and
the retrieval engine have an API accessible to Python, not implemented
as a command line tool. I want to incorporate the search engine into a
larger application that links the text together with media. I know, I
know, big demands, but that's why it's in the conceptual stage with me
right now.

Anyway, hope that adds more information to the thread.

Thanks again,
Doug

mertz at gnosis.cx (David Mertz, Ph.D.) wrote in message news:<mailman.1015360930.26693.python-list at python.org>...
> |Here is a related question -- Is there a search program for
> |structured text files, in particular something that searches XML
> |files.
> 
> You might like my xml_indexer program.  There is a writeup on the design
> at:
> 
>     http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/xml_matters_10.txt
> 
> As with indexer, from which xml_indexer is derived, the module has been
> aggregated into a package found at:
> 
>     http://gnosis.cx/download/Gnosis_XML_Utils-0.9.tar.gz
> 
> Yours, David...